Hard to believe, but articles are popping up at business websites claiming that venerable Hewlett-Packard may fail. In their most recent fiasco, HP wrote off a loss of $8.8 of their $11.1 US billion acquisition of Autonomy and have alleged fraud in the deal. Revenue is down 7% from a year ago and the stock has hit a 10-year low. The company is laying off 27K employees but that may not be enough. Some speculate HP might be broken up into parts with buy-outs involved. This article from last May offers a good in-depth analysis of how all these problems came to pass.

Why is this surprising? crap laptops of poor quality, desktops with low quality out of date components, printers whose ink cost a small fortune, .

I do not find their ink/cartridges to cost a small fortune. Am I missing something? But I already decided to go to EPSON, because HP's ink/cartridges are very expensive and cost prohibitive. And every month, they've got this new model of their disposable printers. We even have a large designjet printer where the Hard Drive was broken and it can't be replaced even if you dd/cloned it because it needs the genuine part number. Sigh. Such a great company.